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I agree with the sentiment on the current level, example the Vivaldi. The crews for Mer,Tizen,Canonical,KDE all need to step to the side and hash out working roms for the various tablets. They need to get the ball rolling so that people can buy product, install, and spur on further development. At the moment, these crews are making the operating systems, but there's no bridge for average users to get them running on their cheap tablets. You have to dedicated a lot of time to even get a working kernel.

There are a lot of missed opportunities.

Imho, the vivaldi route is a good one. Taking an existing and proven device that is affordable, hackable/open source-able (for some value thereof) and resellable, and then putting a proper linux on it and selling it is a very good proof of concept and i hope that it even is a minor commercial success. I just hope that they really can get the touchscreen code out in the open so that they correct Zenithink's horrible GPL violation.

Hashing out working "roms" for __all__ the various tablets is a sisyphean task, especially since most vendors are gross GPL violators. Better to get a few actual results in the real world than just make bold statements and raise expectations that cannot be met.

Surely, having high end tablets would be also great, but a modest start is better than nothing.

Meh the Spark Tablet is a crappy compromise, it's not good enough to garner much attention outside of diehard KDE guys, I know I can't be the only one that is wholly unimpressed with all currently available tablets. Sure theres fast ones, with a crappy custom version of Android and some wonky bits of hardware or locked bootloaders, and sure, there are some interesting low end tablets, but they have slow hardware and are pretty overpriced even when they have some interesting features like what Always Innovating has.

Sadly since the ARM market is nothing like the X86 market it's highly unlikely we'll ever see anything decent for Linux users in the next year or 2 at least...

PlasmaActive team is planning to look for more options. So there is hope. Vivaldi is just the first stop. And given there is nothing else on the horizon right now, I'm sure it'll get enough attention from the Linux crowd (it already got to be precise)

that wm 8710 is pretty new, it had to be a month or 2 ago i couldnt actualy find any way to buy (in usa using google shopping) one. now you CAN find a tv set top box that has one in it, they look to be priced as low as 75ish usd. thats not terrible, 3x as much as the Pi but a little more raw power, the fact is though that even in the arm arena, VIA and its affiliats dont seem to be compeating. as a comparison just go look up all the companies that are throwing out arm cortex + decent gpu combo chips for the cheap, allwinner is one such that came out of nowhere with a cheap powerful chip found in chinatabs. telechips makes a good one too (just look up the tcc8923, dual A5's with a mali 400, you can get a tablet with that for less than 100 usd) and even some of the samsung, ti, qualcomm upper end chips can be gotten for pretty low prices. its a easy market for anyone with any industry clout and VIA should have been at the forfront of that years ago.

ALL ARM mobo until now is overpriced

Say, I can get Atom mobo for around $60. The cpu price is around ~US$43 (http://goo.gl/XcqON). $10 + $10 for 1GB DDR3 + 8GB UFD. That's around $80. And we have here quite complete mobo, with pci-e, etc.

As for, say, beaglebone, for almost same price, what we get? IIRC, the CPU itself is like $5. 512MB DDR2, say, $5. The mobo is unlikely > $20. Really, ARM dev board/mobo (beagleboard, beaglebone, iMX??, pandaboard, etc..etc..) is way to overpriced!

Say, I can get Atom mobo for around $60. The cpu price is around ~US$43 (http://goo.gl/XcqON). $10 + $10 for 1GB DDR3 + 8GB UFD. That's around $80. And we have here quite complete mobo, with pci-e, etc.

As for, say, beaglebone, for almost same price, what we get? IIRC, the CPU itself is like $5. 512MB DDR2, say, $5. The mobo is unlikely > $20. Really, ARM dev board/mobo (beagleboard, beaglebone, iMX??, pandaboard, etc..etc..) is way to overpriced!

Your Atom board is produced in the 100k's. I bet beagleboard is measured in thousands. There's this thing called economy of scale

Your Atom board is produced in the 100k's. I bet beagleboard is measured in thousands. There's this thing called economy of scale

Yep, I know.. but still.. their price is still too high. $149? I thought of bought it in the past, but I think it's silly now. Remember, R-pi is about $35, if you up the mem & SoC to say, 512MB & cortex A9, it's just about $45 at maximum. Oh, IIRC, someone from r-pi project said that too, that beaglebone is overpriced.

doesnt the ebagleboard have an lcd screen on it? i know some of the samsung dev boards for their chips had a touchscreen on it since it was primarily intended for the smartphone development. but ya, dev boards are always expensive, look at the dev costs for the video game consols, they were like 5-10 grand a peice and they just came with a dev modified game ssyte and some peice of software to develop for it. you always pay more for specialy tools that allow you to make money, look at somethign like a klien screwdriver vs a husky (home depot brand) screwdriver, the husky is 5usd, the klien is 12-15 usd, or black and decker drill at 40 usd vs dewalt at 150 usd for basicaly the same volt and battery type drill, you always pay more for the proffessional or developers tools because you have to have it to make your money, go take that husky screw driver and use it 8 hrs 5 days a week for 6 months and it will be all worn down and wont grip screws well while the klien will be much closer to like new, the black and decker drill at 8 hrs 5 days a week wil blow up in a month, while the dewalt should last a couple years at least (due to some marketing bullcrap brought on by all the home DIYers wanting the top name brand tools to hang picture frames that analogy might be a little scewed, basicaly they found they could sell b&d's that were painted yelow and had a dewalt sticker on them for a little less than the pro level stuff and the DIYers wouldnt hardly know the difference while tradesmen who used them constantly were blowing them up and causing the brand name to slip, it seems to be happening all over the market sectors with many brand names these days).

you will always pay more for a product if you intend to use it for makeing money since you need it to function properly in order to make your next paycheck, that doesnt always meen the product is any better in quality or even capabilities, but you do it for the peice of mind. unfortunatly software is one of those areas where paying more often means getting less. peple pay a lot of money for really poorly written software simply because it is industry standard and they need to be compatable, or because often the people in charge of the money dont understand what it is they are buying, but, they often do understand liability and support, so buying a panda board to develop android apps on might sound like spending more money than what its worth, but if you are in charge of a development group making android apps, you would expect the panda-board to have some sort of spoort level form the provider that it will work as it is designed to do and they will assist you in solving issues or even answering questions about hw it works or what parts you need to prod in order to do something. go buy a chinatab through amazon and see if the developer wil help you figure out how to get your app to work on it or update the os on it to support your software. that wasnt part of the 80$ price you paid them for the product. its the same way how you can get centos for free but gots a chunck of change for red hat. its the support you pay for.